


For Alternia (ft. Song of the Twelve) (accompanied by: Four Times the Mage of Mind Greeted the Lone Power And One Time They Defied Him)

by mercuriallyCooperative



Series: Our Alternia [1]
Category: Homestuck, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Also the Lone Power aspects are not specifically canon to our fansession AU, Alternian Empire, Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Everything else is canon though, Fifteen thousand sweeps is an awful long time, How Beforus becomes Alternia, It's just a thing I thought would be interesting, Mirthful Church, Our Grand Highbloods are Different, Our session is kind of a many-headed monster of a canon, SBURB Fan Session, Self-Reflection, Subjuggulators, The Lone Power is subtle except for that one time when he really isn't, The rating is for Homestuck-typical swearing, Though they're not specifically contradicted either, why does our fansession have a canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:56:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6663280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuriallyCooperative/pseuds/mercuriallyCooperative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He didn’t know that this would be the first of the names that he had chosen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For Alternia (a Song remixed)

"Must I accept this Barren Gift?  
-serve Death, and lose my Mastery?

No!- Let them learn whose blood and breath  
will take the Gift and set them free.

Whose is the Mind I hear inside-  
A player of that deathly Game-

When meteoric End arrives  
and grants to all their secret Name?

Then brother, I accept your gift:  
but take my gift, of equal worth;

I take You with me, out of time,  
and make for you a path, a birth!

For, fellow Mage of Mind, I know  
The loss-fear biting at your heart

So let me show you something new  
Created of our age-old part.

For, past our fear lies life for all-  
perhaps for us: and past our dread

Pass loss of Mastery and life,  
The dark gods shall give back Our dead!"

\- Mirthful Founder, Mage of Mind

  
(+)(+)(+)  
  


He didn’t know that this would be the first of the names that he had chosen.

He looked at the best friend he’d made in this life, this first life on a world so newly familiar to him. Arhior looked back at him, curious, waiting for his reply. They’d both be of age soon, able to take titles if they felt the need, and to build a name for the church that would be theirs, it was a given that they needed something to start with that went beyond their aspirations.

His face twisted a little into a rueful grin, fangs grazing his lower lip.

“I’ll be Alasdair. One of the old words that meant keeper and protector, yeah?” He shrugged a little, looked side-eyed at his friend.

Arhior thought for a moment, her newly purple eyes half lidded in thought. She nodded.

“And I’ll be the Luminary, casting Our Word like fire and sunlight.” Her grin was full of teeth.

 _Light-bringer and Defender,_ Mayhew Auroum thought to himself.

He imagined he could hear the universe, laughing in the background.


	2. Eldest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Gl’bgolyb floated through his dreams.)

Alasdair meets, on occasion, with the horrorterrors.

It is the job he’d taken for himself, to learn the sorcery that the Noble Circle might teach him, to use for the favor of their lives on Alternia. He’d had the time, and it had interested him.

There are new shadows lurking in his unconscious now.

Since their battle with the Black King, he’d had the time to study furiously under the tutelage of the ‘terrors in the Outer Ring. They had so much to teach him, so many secret ways, all for the mere price of looking occasionally through his eyes. He could make a dozen, a hundred of himself to experience the world through. He could show his friends to change their shapes now, show them how to appear to grow old or young in a heartbeat. He could teleport across the world in an instant, across solar systems in a minute. (Although the cost of that latter skill had been bought by several deaths in the cold vacuum of space before he mastered navigation, and remembered the idea of bringing a pressurized space suit.)

Either way. There was so much to be _learned_ from the horrorterrors. He sought their counsel with minimal reluctance.

All but one, at least.

Gl’bgolyb sleeps, deep in Alternia’s ocean, in the darkest of deep-sea trenches. She is de jure lusus to the fuschiabloods who were meant to rule Alternia, despite the recent tradition for such heirs to be raised by their predecessor. Those heirs are brought to meet their greatest weapon, to be accepted by her. They feed her dead lusii, unclaimed from the Empire’s morgues. And then they leave her to sleep beneath the sea.

He'd visited her. Once.

Her shifting bulk had dwarfed him, and even in her sleep, her writhing appendages caused tremors in the water. Even with his immortality, the guarantee that this death would not be just or heroic, but rather very stupid indeed, he'd felt the urge to run. And scream. Run and scream, those were two good options.

One of her many eyes opened before him, freezing him in place.

This was no pure horrorterror. The horrorterrors that rested within this continuity, the ones he’d met and heard tell of, all radiated a cold, quiet malevolence. A spring, wound and wound up to cracking, pinched just between the world-doorways and their broken hinges. And they chuckled with calm, patient destructiveness. Willing and ready to give their foolish supplicants the skills necessary to destroy themselves.

G’bgolyb _was_ all of these things, given. Her gleaming eye looked through him, flatly, as though behind him rode the history of the whole world and those in it. Cold though the water was, that stare fixed a deep shiver in his bones, like a saw screaming through his marrow. He felt the ghostly sensation of his blood draining into the water; a death that loomed over him in that moment, as clear as his reflection in that massive eye.

But she was something _other_. Something alien to him; unmet on any journey through the Outer Ring. For a brief instant, he could feel it: She was not ageless like true horrorterrors. And that age was a vastness he had never felt bearing down upon his spine before; she was older than any world he had ever known.

Then her eye closed. And her restlessness stilled for awhile.

He swam up to the world above.

In his dreams that night, he'd dreamed of that single gleaming eye. A voice had echoed.

“Not yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (this aspect of the Lone Power is rather difficult to write and still contrast to horrorterrors)


	3. Fairest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (He sees glory in her eyes.)

They are attacked on the way home from a sermon.

The word of the mirthful gods is spreading quietly among their agemates and their successive generations. The sermons, hidden away in old warehouses or publicly advertised at the local schoolhive, are drawing attention, provoking discourse, being _noticed_. Soon, the whole of Alternia will know their names.

For once, that’s the problem. For a peaceful world that had never seen organized religion in living memory, there was still a kind of social stratification. Not highbloods and lowbloods, no, not yet. That would be in millennia to come, as the time loop ran its course and his poor church’s doctrine was co-opted by a hundred angry claws. No, at the moment the divide was between warmbloods and coldbloods, a faint air of infuriating platonic pity for the trolls with hues more blue and purple, condemning them to long lives filled with a touch of temper and a touch of madness, and, indeed, a touch of sadness over loosing any of the more numerous warmerblooded trolls of their acquaintance. Those long lives spent enriching the short, quick, passionate callings of the warmbloods who assumed a cooler blood and a slow age meant as slow a wit and as limited a passion.

That being said, it was making a number of warmbloods nervous to hear tell of the growing church and its sermons. Such devotion, such drive, was thought to be alien to most of the coolerblooded kind. Cerulean and indigo, purple and violet, joining such an organization alongside a plethora of burgundy, bronze, gold and green, that would be one thing. But two coldblooded trolls raising a veritable army on the strength of their spirit? Unheard of, a sort of aberration.

A gang of warmbloods certainly thought so, anyway. An oliveblood with a maul clasped in his claws leads a few burgundybloods and bronzebloods, two lime-or-goldbloods, and one whose sign looks a touch bronze-gold, and who crackles with faint psionic sparks. The oliveblood sneers at them, demands that they get back in their place, return to making the world more comfortable for the more worthy warmblooded. The empty side street magnifies his snarled demands to a shout.

Alasdair sighs. Feels their malice through his chucklevoodoos, razors in the air. If it were just him, he would smile ruefully, the paints on his face contorting into a gentle caricature of obedient mirth. And he would nod amicably and stride on back to his hive. But the time for gentleness is over, for now; his church needs strength from him. A show of force, justifiable to the legislacerators in the face of a clear threat, enough bravery for the word to spread and let his future people know that he would stand by his preaching.

He feels eyes peering at them from the windows of buildings around them as he turns to his companion.

“They really wanna kill us for our Word?” the Luminary asks him lightly, rhetorically; her ‘voodoos are easily as strong as his own. She can feel their disdain. He nods, and draws his juggling clubs from his belt; she draws her morningstar from her own. They turn back to the oliveblood and his gang, now a bare few feet away. The psionic is exuding a heavy pressure in the air, a weight that steals at their breath. The burgundies and bronzes are circling around the sides, while the lime-golds bristle with knives.

“Yeah,” Alasdair shakes his head at them, “nah. You motherfuckers oughta blow off this strife; no business getting all your die on with this miraclefucker and his wicked heresies.”

“Or,” the Luminary shrugs, “you can charge us. No skin off our claws.”

They charge.

Against a god and a god’s disciple-friend, they stand no chance beyond the Void.

The psionic’s body is lying on the ground, neck cracked simply and sharply by hand. One of the burgundies lies unmoving, crashed against a nearby building. The lime-golds are slumped against each other, gaping indents in their crushed sides, bones shattered by blunt, crushing force. Their own knives lightly pierce their flesh, pressed between what once were ribs and into seeping lungs.

Alasdair scowls at them, breathing a bit hard. He is out of practice fighting warmerblood psychics; he definitely needs to find one of his coplayers and take up sparring them again. Their minds can slide and dart around the press of his own power, fireflies for the catching. Before he’d managed to stun them with his ‘voodoos, the lime-golds had managed to get off a knife or two; the psionic had guided them true enough and strong as artillery. One blade had barreled through his right shoulder, while another tore a good inch out of his side. The wounds begin to heal immediately of course, but pleasant they are not.

He turns to check the rest of the battlefield, fallen eerily silent.

The Luminary is resplendent.

She kneels amidst what was once the body of the oliveblood, a field of green spreading in pools and pieces below her. One of her hands rests within the cage of what had been his ribs, claws digging into the tattered flesh. Congealing bronze runs from her weapon down the other hand as she sets it against her shoulder, while spots of that ichor stain her pants. Rusty burgundy drenches the white of her shirt and spatters across her cheeks, and the part of Alasdair who started out human feels a thrill of fear and avarice entwined at the sight of blood almost like his had been, painted across the Luminary’s body.

He traces the lines of trailing blood with his eyes up to her own, and only now sees the fierce joy in the snarl locked upon her face. Her eyes glitter, pupils blown wide enough to obscure their natural purple. Her mouth is spread open in a grin, revealing sharp teeth stained red and bronze, and as her eyes turn sightlessly toward him, she throws back her horns and laughs. A wild howl that reaches toward the moons.

A slight smile stretches across his face as Alasdair walks over to her.

“Heya,” he says. “Fancy all up and meeting you here.” He offers her a hand; she accepts, letting herself be pulled to her feet. The war-light in her eyes fades a little, then, into weariness. She takes a step, and stumbles into him; he feels the prickle of her ‘voodoos in his skin fade into a velvety weight leaning against his mind. A trickle of blood, a little more purple than his own, drips down one of her sleeves.

Alasdair glances around them, and sighs, fishing a laminated business information rectangle from his pocket. It flutters as he drops it onto the oliveblood’s remains; contact information on one side, the sign of their church on the other. He turns to his companion, standing still and staring up at the stars. The sky is brightening, and in the waning moonslight, their enemies’ blood paints her grey skin like sacrifices to a god graven in stone.

“It’s been a long night,” the Luminary remarks, all hundred-fifty of their sweeps together in her voice. “We better hurry home before the morning.”


End file.
